I took these photos of the two major bike cages on the main campus around 9am one morning. These bike cages can be made accessible to any campus employee who shows up at the subterranean parking garage office during the random hours they are open. They re-magnetize your campus ID to allow entry and give you a parking sticker. This is free, but it took me almost a month to get there during a time they were actually open. I assume that it’s not much easier for other people.

This is the second bike cage (slightly smaller)

All of this actually does not seem to be much of a deterrent. The bike cages nearly always look like this, unless it is later in the day, when there are even more bikes. They thin out a little late at night, but a medical center is open 24 hours a day, so there are always bicycles there. The cages are regularly inspected by campus security, and bikes left longer than a few days with a campus sticker result in a call to the owner; bikes without a sticker get confiscated in the short term, and sold after a year unclaimed. This is not long-term bike storage.

More racks outside the bike cages

Outside the main cages is overflow parking. The bike cages are monitored by parking attendants and by remote cameras. There is never enough bike parking.

2 responses to “The reason they’re building more bike parking where I work”

There aren’t exactly give incentives for riding as much as disincentives for driving. Car parking on campus is wildly expensive (pushing $200/month), permits are restricted, and even if you have one, most of the time the available parking is valet once the garage gets crowded. And for reasons I don’t understand my colleagues really hate handing their car keys over to the valet, although it is included with the parking fee and no one has ever had a car damaged.

Students can’t buy parking permits at all and I suspect they’re a big portion of the riders.

I am on the campus sustainability committee and there is much more than could be done: free transit passes for all employees, subsidies of the commuter shuttles and van pools, expansion of the university shuttle routes, commuter checks for cyclists, a cafeteria benefit plan where employees could get cash back for every non-driving day, etc. And yet the crowded bike parking serves as testimony to how effective restricting parking can be all by itself in reducing car commuting.